<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type">
<title></title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<br>
Many many weeks ago, Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
<blockquote cite="midopsma0vtqtu9mfh0@lamar.colostate.edu" type="cite"><br>
Eventually I want to c a TeX-friendly Unicode editor so I can dispense
with transcriptions for the most part... <br>
<br>
</blockquote>
[NB: This is somewhat off-topic but I thought some readers of this
list might
appreciate.]<br>
<br>
Nowadays I seldom use transcriptions, except when entering individual,
rarely-used characters or symbols. <br>
<br>
May I suggest some open-source TeX-friendly Unicode editors that work
on
multiple platforms?<br>
<br>
<b>jEdit</b> (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="http://www.jedit.org">www.jedit.org</a>) is a user-friendly,
full-featured,
extensible programmer's
editor. It natively supports unicode and has a simple but efficient
LaTeX support in the form of syntax highlightning, a third party
plug-in, clip-ins, etc. This editor is
written entirely in Java, so it may be a bit slow to start, especially
on older
machines. It has become quite popular even outside the Javacentric
world. It is great for XML editing too.<br>
<br>
My favorite is <b>VIM</b> (<a href="http://www.vim.org">www.vim.org</a>),
a fantastic editor with excellent latex support (see
<a href="http://vim-latex-suite.sf.net">vim-latex-suite.sf.net</a>) and
full unicode support. You can define your
own keymaps to type Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Greek, etc. (even CJK).
True bidirectionality is not yet implemented but you can switch
from LR to RL display. I seriously tried VIM only recently (of course I
had met old vi in the early '90s on Unix ...), and it has since become
my
editor of
choice. <br>
<br>
I am not a fan of <b>emacs</b> (a simple matter of taste, not
ideology), but, combined with AucTeX, it certainly makes a very
powerful LaTeX editor. Unicode support is good but I think not as
advanced as with VIM. I never tried MULE since it does not support
Arabic script. There also exists a small and fast emacs clone called <b>qEmacs</b>
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemacs/">http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemacs/</a>)
with built-in
support for bidirectional display, full Unicode support and built-in
latex-mode. Its current development is not very active, though, and I
don't know whether many people use it, but it is worth a try!! I think
it would be an ideal editor on a handheld computer. <br>
<br>
Now for specific platforms:<br>
<br>
Under GNU/Linux with KDE there is <b>kile</b> (which stands for <u>K</u>DE
<u>I</u>ntegrated <u>L</u>aTeX <u>E</u>nvironment). It is certainly
at least as good as <b>WinEdt</b> (if not actually much better), and
like most modern
Linux applications, it supports Unicode. If you enjoy WinEdt on Windows
and are ready to switch to Linux, you will
love it. <br>
<br>
For easy typing of uncommon scripts and alphabets, the following two
well-known Unicode editors are fine: <br>
<b>SC Unipad </b>(commercial, <a href="http://www.unipad.org">unipad.org</a>)
is a good multilingual
Unicode editor for Windows, and <b>yudit</b> (<a
href="http://www.yudit.org">www.yudit.org</a>) is an open source
alternative with
several nice features. Both editors only offer the most basic editing
tools, however, so that you wouldn't use them as "real" editors. <br>
<br>
For Mac OS X there exists a complete TeX typesetting system with
Unicode and Mac OS X font technology, called <b>XeTeX</b>, which
combined with <b>TeXShop</b> (a TeX GUI, see <a
href="http://www.uoregon.edu/%7Ekoch/texshop/texshop.html">http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html</a>)
seems to deliver a fantastic typesetting environment. XeTeX's url is: <a
href="http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex">http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex<br>
</a>... Makes me wish I had a PowerMac :-) <br>
<br>
Hope this is useful.<br>
<br>
François<br>
</body>
</html>